Sun still gets it

As I've said here before, Sun gets the commodity hardware game. Today they announced a major alliance with Intel to support Solaris on Intel commodity compute hardware. While Sun positioned this as a way to augment their proprietary Sparc processor hardware, the writing is clearly on the wall at Sun and they know they need to embrace commodity compute instead of letting the Sparc processor boat anchor sink the ship. It's hard to hoist the anchor when you're underway, but they are trying....

So, remind me again - if the enterprise can use commodity compute from Intel for enterprise applications, databases, operating systems, middleware and so on (all of which are complicated and can be compute intensive), then why does this same commodity compute not work for packet processing and routing/forwarding table management?

The answer is here in front of our eyes - open source Linux leveraging commodity compute for the enterprise has been sailing forward for over ten years and is now commonplace. Now, it's time for the networking community to leverage commodity compute - time to get on board as the anchor is up and we're sailing toward the future!